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Pepsi Cheer — Social Media Done Wrong

January 9, 2010

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The Pepsi Cheer?

The Pepsi Cheer?

Update April 21, 2010: Looks like I was quoted over at Media.asia in Five things you need to know about: Social media and brands by Andrew Knott. Nice to be ref­er­enced how­ever briefly.

You’re prob­a­bly doing Social Media in your Inter­net Mar­ket­ing mix, most com­pa­nies and mar­keters have jumped on that band­wagon faster than peo­ple become Dal­las Cow­boys fans when they go on a win­ning streak.

To be hon­est, chances are if you’re doing Social Media you are most likely com­pletely wast­ing your time and resources because you’re doing social media badly.

No offense. But the large major­ity of mar­keters sim­ple do not use Social Media the same way they might use other forms of media and advertising.

No ROI (Return On Invest­ment). This can also be mea­sured in Brand terms rather than dol­lar amounts.
No clear and defin­i­tive goals.
No strat­egy.

If you took a few hours, set up a Face­book group, Face­book fan page and Twit­ter feed then sim­ply post to those pro­files then you’re com­pletely wast­ing your time.

Stop.
Stop Now.

Doing Social Media badly is much worse than not doing Social Media at all.

As with every­thing in Mar­ket­ing you need to attach a value, strat­egy and exe­cu­tion plan to each and every pro­gram you put in place. If you don’t then frankly you’re Mar­ket­ing badly.

Case in point.

Let's pretend this didn't happen, OK?

Let’s pre­tend this didn’t hap­pen, OK?

The Pepsi Cheer was an abysmal fail­ure from a Social Media stand­point and from a Mar­ket­ing stand­point. Here is a good overview from Mar­ket­ing Mag:

Pepsi Seek­ing One Mil­lion Mem­bers for Pepsi Cheer

This cam­paign was the brain child of the Toronto Agency Cap­i­tal C (Yeah that’s right their cor­po­rate web­site is hosted on Type­pad — very edgy).

Before we look at Pepsi’s Social Media Strat­egy results, let’s have a quick look at what they implemented:

On Face­book
http://www.facebook.com/PepsiCanada
http://www.facebook.com/PepsiCanada#/PepsiCanada?v=app_193041964437

Twit­ter
http://twitter.com/PEPSICANADA

and

http://www.pepsi.ca/jointhecheer/default.aspx?bhcp=1

Here’s what Pepsi wanted to do:

  1. Cre­ate a con­test to cre­ate a Cheer for Hockey Canada and the 2010 IIHF Mens’s Hockey Cham­pi­onship in Germany.
  2. Have the win­ning cheer pro­moted via Social Media, on tele­vi­sion and radio.
  3. Have fans at the events use the cheer dur­ing the games to be started by Pepsi employ­ees in the crowd (really bad idea).

The win­ning cheer was an annoy­ing (in my opin­ion) “Eh! Oh-Canada! Go!” which was a cus­tomer sub­mit­ted cheer and was then heav­ily pro­moted through adver­tis­ing medi­ums (all listed above).

Now on a fun­da­men­tal level this idea should have died in a brain­storm­ing ses­sion. You never ever mess with the patri­o­tism of Cana­dian Hockey fans. Here in Canada, Hockey is a big part of people’s sports watch­ing mix and par­tic­u­larly since Canada dom­i­nates Inter­na­tional Hockey (even though we lost in the finals to the US this past year).

The cheers Cana­di­ans have been using for years are pretty pop­u­lar and there was never a need to add a new one to the mix when it was clearly a very shal­low cor­po­rate mar­ket­ing initiative.

Their bru­tal social media imple­men­ta­tion also caused them more brand dam­age than had they done absolutely noth­ing. Pepsi and their agency failed to remem­ber one key com­po­nent of Social Media.

It’s a con­ver­sa­tion with peo­ple. Peo­ple can (and should talk back).

The Pepsi Cheer Gone Wrong

The Pepsi Cheer Gone Wrong

This is exactly what peo­ple did and it wasn’t pretty.

Let’s look at some very basic stats:

Pepsi’s Face­book Fan Page: 134,926 Fans
Pepsi Canada’s Twit­ter Pro­file: 1034 Followers

Basic Neg­a­tive Results

Pepsi — I Don’t need yer damn cheer
231 mem­bers
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=259956356825

The” Eh! Oh! Canada Go!” chant is a national embar­rass­ment
64,762 Mem­bers
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=217528662837

Twit­ter Search for Pepsi Cheer
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pepsi+cheer

I’ll actu­ally run a rep­u­ta­tion report for this later in the week and add this to an over­all case study, since this is such a bla­tantly bad idea.

Let’s have a quick look at why I’m say­ing this was not only a bad Mar­ket­ing idea but it was a fail­ure from a Social media perspective:

  1. Pepsi struck a chord with a national sport and national pride. Basi­cally say­ing “You’re doing it wrong Canada”. Bad idea.
  2. Pepsi bla­tantly pro­moted them­selves over sim­ply pro­mot­ing cheer­ing for the team.
  3. Replac­ing the cheer was unnec­es­sary. There are a num­ber of cheer Pepsi could have latched onto and pro­moted. This likely would have gone over well.
  4. Their social media pro­files sim­ply ignored any back­lash except for a few ref­er­ences to cheer­ing “any cheer you want”. Too lit­tle too late.
  5. The Pepsi Canada Twit­ter stream did lit­tle to engage any­one talk­ing on Twit­ter except for pos­i­tive feed­back and inane Re-Tweets about their promotion.
  6. The Pepsi Canada Twit­ter stream was hardly used but it was still there. Hey Pepsi Mar­ket­ing Team — here’s a tip. Don’t use it if you’re going to use it badly.
  7. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pepsi+cheer has far more neg­a­tive sen­ti­ments than neu­tral or pos­i­tive ones. Clearly Pepsi made a mis­take here since they’re ignor­ing the fans they tried to approach. Oops that only serves to piss peo­ple off.
  8. The neg­a­tive groups on Face­book almost out­num­ber the Fans of the Pepsi Cheer Fan Page. As a side note there is a decent set of sign up forms and calls to action on inter­nal tabs of the fan page but there appears to be lit­tle focus to the fan page. They would have been bet­ter off to have par­tic­i­pated in other Fan Pages (exam­ple: Hockey Canada) than to try to become the hub of Hockey Fans.
The Pepsi Cheer clearly annoying.

The Pepsi Cheer clearly annoying.

This is just the begin­ning of this fiasco for Pepsi in my hum­ble opin­ion. They’ll be deal­ing with the back­lash for quite some­time. Par­tic­u­larly since they appear to be stay­ing the course on the same bad Social Media Strategy.

Another dumb move.

The key take aways here:

If you are going to do Social Media prop­erly then do it prop­erly and think about what you are doing, devote resources, a strat­egy and team to it.

If you think you need to have a pres­ence on Social Net­works just for the sake of being there, then you’re dead wrong.

If you are going to do a half assed job of Social Media Mar­ket­ing then do your­self a favour and don’t do it at all.

Addi­tional References

Junior Hockey Chant Falls Flat — Van­cou­ver Sun

Tra­di­tional Cheers Given Vocal Sup­port — Star Phoenix

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  2. Using Stum­ble­Upon Effectively

Written by Dan Nedelko · Filed Under Features, Social Networking 

Comments

12 Responses to “Pepsi Cheer — Social Media Done Wrong”

  1. Is Your Carbonated Beverage Social Enough? on January 14th, 2010 7:04 pm

    […] not very classy and not as funny as was intended. In Canada, an ini­tia­tive to get fans to use a Pepsi-approved cheer at the hockey events was another near miss that has left them enough neg­a­tive response to dis­miss any pos­i­tive results […]

  2. Julio Ricardo Varela on January 18th, 2010 2:53 pm

    Exactly. The biggest chal­lenge com­pa­nies can’t seem to under­stand is that their ideas will always be scru­ti­nized. If they aren’t being real about it, it is a waste of their time. Less pro­mo­tion and more con­nec­tion, in my opin­ion. Develop true rela­tion­ships and don’t mar­ket your base, don’t sell them. Just id what your brand per­son­al­ity is and work that. Any­thing else is just crazy mak­ing. Nice post!

  3. Matt on January 20th, 2010 1:46 pm

    Excel­lent analy­sis. How­ever, I think you’re being too harsh. Social media is 5–10 years old (if even that). Hell Twit­ter wasn’t even that big 2 years ago. Mis­takes are bound to be made. I think Pepsi made a huge error as well but I think they should be com­mended for tak­ing a mar­ket­ing risk (instead of say stick­ing to 30 sec­ond TV spots).

  4. Dan Nedelko on January 20th, 2010 1:51 pm

    @Matt I don’t think it’s unrea­son­able to expect a major brand to put some thought into a com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­egy as it relates to social media. If any­thing it shows how lit­tle thought was put into this beyond “yeah that seems cool!” — any user test­ing on a cam­paign like this would have revealed the error in their strat­egy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not begrudg­ing them for uti­liz­ing social media, I’m say­ing that their entire cam­paign and com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy was ill thought out at best. Just as a note, they ran mul­ti­ple TV ad spots dur­ing prime time sport­ing events all over the coun­try. Mis­takes like this don’t need to hap­pen if you’re a pro­fes­sional mar­keter and under­stand new media.

  5. Bill on February 16th, 2010 10:04 am

    Calamity — guess they will not be using Toronto Agency Cap­i­tal C again.

    Les­son to be learnt: choose your social media con­sul­tants carefully!

  6. Jim Estill on February 16th, 2010 8:40 pm

    I am won­der­ing is this is a case where any press is good press. And the fact you talked about it again just adds to that?

    Makes me feel like I should go crack a Pepsi.

  7. Dan Nedelko on February 16th, 2010 8:46 pm

    @Jim I don’t really sub­scribe to that notion in gen­eral although I have heard of peo­ple say­ing the very same thing. In this case I would ven­ture to say that the pub­lic back­lash was neg­a­tive enough and directly pointed at Pepsi — will this neg­a­tively affect sales? Not likely. How­ever will it neg­a­tively affect their brand image in the Cana­dian mar­ket? That’s pretty much shown to be the case. Oh yeah and enjoy your Pepsi :)

  8. Dan Nedelko on February 16th, 2010 8:49 pm

    @Jim Sorry for­got to reply to your sec­ond com­ment. I’m not try­ing to pre­vent chat­ter about the Pepsi cam­paign, from a cer­tain per­spec­tive the ker­nel of the idea was not that hor­ri­ble. The exe­cu­tion and mes­sag­ing was extremely flawed, to Pepsi’s credit they tried to recover but at that point the back­lash was in full swing. The fact that I talked about it only adds to the dis­cus­sion which is a good thing. I’m not try­ing to pre­vent dis­cus­sion, I’m much more inter­ested in look­ing at the cam­paign and dis­cussing it. So yeah. Mis­sion accomplished.

  9. Tommi Heinonen on March 4th, 2010 3:22 pm

    This is also a great exam­ple of giv­ing the mar­ket­ing peo­ple too much power with­out super­vi­sion. With­out proper man­age­ment there can´t be real case stud­ies. Focus must be kept within the company.

  10. Sean Rosensteel on August 26th, 2010 8:56 am

    Inter­est­ing arti­cle, Dan. I wasn’t aware of this Pepsi Cheer until now, and the face­book and twit­ter stats really tell the story loud and clear.

    What’s inter­est­ing to me, is that with social media, you can actu­ally mea­sure a NEGATIVE impact… 64,000 peo­ple thought the Pepsi cheer was a “national embar­rass­ment” — now that’s just comical!

  11. Dan Nedelko on August 26th, 2010 12:53 pm

    @Sean yeah it def­i­nitely works as a per­fect case study for any­one engag­ing in Social Media. kNow to Pepsi’s credit I think they learned their les­son because their next foray into Social Media with their “Refresh Every­thing” non profit cam­paign seems to have worked out incred­i­bly well.

    Just goes to show you that one mis­take in Social Media can be an amaz­ing learn­ing expe­ri­ence and lay the ground work for highly effec­tive activites that engage the con­sumer directly.

  12. Risky Business | A Ridiculous Mind on September 1st, 2010 12:54 am

    […] We’ve seen too much brand try­ing to hide them­selves when clients com­plaints gets tough on their Face­book page. Some of them even try to game the sys­tem or delete bad reviews of their prod­ucts. How short­sighted and risky is this? […]

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